The season’s first episode follows the lead character, Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope, to Washington DC, where she met real political figures such as Joe Biden (her hero), Olympia Snowe, Barbara Boxer, and John McCain. Recent episodes have been titled "Soda Tax" and "How a Bill Becomes a Law" and highlight the nitty-gritty — if comically histrionic — details about local politics. In addition, the show's constant use of innuendo surrounding current political events, reenactment of debates concerning economics and governance, and tongue-in-cheek references to the increasing conservatism of American politics have made Parks and Rec more a comedic primer in American politics than a primetime comedy.

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Phillips had a long history in conservative and right-wing movements, including three runs as a third-party presidential candidate. He sat on the board of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and worked on Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign. He then went on to get involved in the administration of Richard Nixon, who appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

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Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today urged him to reconsider immigration legislation because of the bombings in Boston. “The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system,” Paul writes. “If we don’t use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs.”

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), senior Republican senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for an immigration reform bill, is using much the same language – suggesting that the investigation of two alleged Boston attackers will “help shed light on the weaknesses of our system.”

Can we just get a grip? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a naturalized American citizen. He came to the United States when he was nine years old. He attended the public schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from where I lived.

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This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget states their study "found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth." The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth."

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As a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that typically drive law-makers' decision-making process. Public opinion no longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable problem for the party establishment's efforts to broaden the GOP's appeal beyond angry old white people.

House Republicans may care about the GOP's national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

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Anyway, initial responses ranged from the incoherent—”I don’t see this as fundamental entitlement reform as much as clarifying a statistic which does happen to save money” (Paul Ryan)—to the opportunistic “Let’s set aside our differences and come together on things we can agree on” (Eric Cantor saying let’s do CPI but not the higher tax revenues in the budget)—to the faux-outraged House GOP campaign chair Greg Walden who labeled the President’s budget a “shocking attack on seniors.”

It’s that last part where things got weird today.  As the WaPo reports, Boehner and Cantor are distancing themselves from Walden, since they want these cuts.  And the very conservative Club for Growth…

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"People get paid $100 million to throw a baseball! Shouldn't we all take less and pass some of that money onto others? Think about firefighters, teachers and policemen. We should celebrate people that are intellectually smart and trying to make this world a better place."

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Well, you can't get much more serious than talking to Teradata, the "data warehousing" company that helps Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay store massive amounts of information about the behavior of their customers.

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In 1943, Allied forces achieved a hard-fought victory in the North African campaign, captured Sicily, and began to fight their way up the Italian peninsula. Victories in places such as El-Alamein, Salerno, and Anzio gave America some confidence that the Allies would ultimately prevail in Europe. That confidence allowed the American public to shift more of its attention to the Pacific Theater. Popular magazines such as National Geographic began to publish more maps and articles about the Pacific because Americans suddenly wanted to know a lot more about Saipan and Leyte Gulf.

The same sort of shift is happening now for the left in America’s long-running culture war. From the 1980s until the birth of the Tea Party, most of the action was in the Social Theater, in which the religious right and the secular left waged an existential struggle for the soul of American society. Issues related to sexuality, drugs, religion, family life, and patriotism were particularly vexing, and many people over 40 can recall the names of battlefields such as Mapplethorpe, needle exchange, 2 Live Crew, and the flag-burning amendment. But the left won a smashing victory in the 2012 elections, including the first victories at the ballot box for gay marriage. These triumphs, combined with polling data showing the tolerant attitudes of younger voters, give the left confidence that it will ultimately prevail on most issues in the Social Theater. The power base of the religious right is older, white, rural Protestants, a group that immigration, demography, and urban renewal have consigned to play an ever-shrinking role in American presidential elections.

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor agreed. He said on CNBC he didn’t understand “why we just don’t see the White House come forward and do the things that we agree on” such as cutting Social Security, without additional tax increases.

Get it? The Republican leadership is already salivating over the President’s proposed Social Security cut. They’ve been wanting to cut Social Security for years.

But they won’t agree to close tax loopholes for the rich.

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The right had a new champion. Having weakened and nearly destroyed the private sector union movement in America over the last 30 years, it was time to home in on a new target: public sector unions and, in fact, the very idea that a fair society requires a robust public sphere. (Hint: This is true for the non-wealthy, less so for people who can buy their way into private schools, private beaches, private jets and so on.)

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As the coverage of Margaret Thatcher's death this week reminds us, the 1980s still define us in so many ways. The National Geographic Channel poll, timed to the Sunday premiere of the channel's three-night "The '80s: The Decade That Made Us," is chock-full of revealing findings about why exactly that is.

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Two congressmen from Florida, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, have raised this point in a letter to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, demanding to know the exact purpose of the celebrities' trip and how it was approved. The letter notes that under U.S. law "the licensing of financial transactions for 'tourist activities' in Cuba" are prohibited by law." According to OFAC, notes the letter, only Americans with a "full-time schedule of educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction between the travelers and individuals in Cuba" are allowed to visit. "These restrictions are in place because the Cuban dictatorship is one of four U.S.-designated state sponsors of terrorism with one of the world’s most egregious human rights records," write Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart.

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What’s wrong with American politics and what can be done about it is the question that election law expert Rick Hasen sets for himself in a fascinating new paper. In particular, he asks whether American politics is so broken that the only cure is to chuck the Constitution and replace it with a parliamentary system or some other radical systemic reform.

Hasen lays out the well-known case of dysfunction (perhaps best set out in Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s recent "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks") and considers, but mostly rejects, three possible rejoinders: that gridlock is actually what voters want; that gridlock is to some extent an illusion, and the system is more productive than frustrated partisans believe; and that dysfunction is real but could be cured by less-drastic measures such as Senate reform and electoral reform.

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The National Federation of Teachers and well-known civil rights advocates slammed the report, issued by former GOP congressman and Department of Homeland Security official  Asa Hutchinson. They said militarizing schools with more guns was not the answer to gun violence. Nor was putting more police into schools, particularly in communities of color. That only increases hostilities for students, not safe learning environments.

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The NRCC also hired 20 writers (the GOP will save publishing!) to create conservative versions of the soul-deadening crap BuzzFeed's list-generators are forced to compile. While it may sound like the aim is to appeal to a new demo -- kids who remember the '90s and who also believe that balancing the federal budget with deep domestic spending cuts will also somehow spur economic growth -- it's actually not quite that ambitious: The point is to boost traffic to the NRCC website, and therefore to increase donations to the NRCC. It appeared to be working, too, even before the entire liberal Internet stopped to point and laugh at the notion of a "conservative BuzzFeed," giving the project a massive amount of attention.

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The site has already added "13 Animals That Are Really Bummed on Obamacare's Third Birthday" and meme-like images on its Facebook page, such as this one:
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"BuzzFeed's eating everyone's lunch," NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing told the National Journal. "They're making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way."

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Well, Reagan's daughter Patti Davis has a theory about where her dad would have stood on gay rights and same-sex marriage.

In an interview with the New York Times on Thursday, Davis pointed to her father's belief in limited government, his Hollywood history and a lesbian couple -- Davis' "aunt and aunt" -- who were close family friends as reasons Reagan would have backed marriage equality: "I grew up in this era where your parents’ friends were all called aunt and uncle. And then I had an aunt and an aunt. We saw them on holidays and other times. We never talked about it, but I just understood that they were a couple."

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AAN's Pete Meachum told the Examiner that Cater America head Rob Jennings said, "See what it would take to get Gaga instead of Dolly."

From the Examiner:

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When news of Young's comment broke, Republican leaders (newly committed to having Latino voters and immigrants like them) issued strongly worded statements disavowing the remark. House Speaker John Boehner called Young's use of the word "offensive and beneath the dignity of the office he holds." Other House GOP leaders joined Boehner in his criticism, saying there was "no excuse" for Young's language and that it warranted "an immediate apology."

On Thursday, the 21-term congressman issued a statement explaining that he "used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in central California." Young said that he that he "meant no disrespect," but did not apologize for the slur.

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